Against my better judgement, I’ve started working on gearing up another of my characters that I abandoned after hitting 80 in the month after the WotLK launch. I’d finished with all of my EoT gear on my Paladin and Shaman, and told myself that I was just going to get exalted with two factions for a couple of tailoring patterns. In the course of doing that, I ended up getting enough EoT to pick up a couple of pieces of Tier 9, and before long I found myself chain-queueing for heroics on a character that I was going to let rot until Cataclysm.
That’s a long way of saying that I’ve been running even more dungeon finder groups than is my custom recently. It’s taking a bit of a toll on me – I find myself having less patience with people than I’d like to, and at times acting like a jerk in response to jerkish behaviour. I wiped a group on heroic Halls of Reflection because I refused to exploit the escape encounter with them. Technically, they wiped themselves, as I was just standing in a safe spot and didn’t move to heal when when the first wave of adds came, but it’s the same thing in the end.
Around the point where my frustration was getting the better of me, I read an interesting article by Matthew Rossi on wow.com. In short, he says that putting raid-level expectations onto the people you meet in dungeon finder groups is not only a recipe for driving yourself batty but is unfair to everyone involved.
Between the point of his article and the ongoing commentary from my post on selfishness, I started to think about why these groups were getting to me. Was it the groups, or me? Were the groups completing the dungeon? Yes, for the most part – maybe 5% of the groups I’ve been in have failed to complete the instance, and that was usually on the path to Tyrannus in the Pit of Saron.
Reflection
So if the groups were completing the dungeon, and I was getting my emblems and rolls on loot, why was I getting annoyed? It was because the groups weren’t living up to my expectations.
A much wiser man than me gave me this sage advice: “expectations are just premeditated resentments”.
The groups that I meet in the dungeon finder don’t tick a check box that says “I promise to live up to the standards of an experienced four-year raider”. So why was I treating them like they had?
In my defense, I’m pretty lenient about performance compared to some people. The numbers I quoted in the selfishness articles are the ones I live by – I don’t complain about DPS unless they’re consistently below 1500, and I’ll happily heal a tank with 25k buffed HP through the original heroics. But when it comes to situational awareness and having respect for other people, I take a hard line. Neither of these are required for random heroics. The fomer makes things run a bit more smoothly and the lack of the latter is more a comment on society as a whole than WoW in specific.
Yet I find myself pushing the things that are important to me on people who may have a completely different set of values. I like clean execution. The myriad melee DPS who have killed themselves on Krystallus obviously don’t. But they seem to have fun and don’t blame anyone but themselves. Obviously I’m taking things a bit too seriously if someone else gets themselves killed and I let that bother me.
Does this mean that I’m going to instantly become an easy-going dungeon runner that lets nothing bother him? Not likely. But I will try to put myself in the shoes of people who don’t take this game as seriously, and not judge them so harshly.
This graphic illustrates the problem. The normal modes of the next patch overlap too much with the hard modes of the current patch. If you’re only playing for gear, it may be hard to see the point of pushing to complete Ulduar-10 hard modes when the same level of gear will come from a 5-man heroic in patch 3.3.
